Posts Tagged xp

No Mac support as yet, but… install VMWARE and XP, and it works great. I’m listening to Radio Havana on 6050 KHz right now on a three foot piece of wire. Tomorrow, when I can buy a length of coax, I’ll hook it up to my shortwave antenna, which is out of reach of my computer desktop right now. I expect to have a lot of fun.

I tried it with Parallels 2, but Parallels screws up the USB connection and it just won’t fly. It was less expensive to “cross-grade” to VMWARE than it was to buy a Parallels “support incident”, so Parallels just lost a paying customer. Funny how that works. VMWARE imported my Parallels XP VM without comment, and the only catch was that XP bitched at me about having to be re-registered because “my hardware had changed significantly.” Oops. Turns out that wasn’t a problem… re-registration went smoothly, just a couple clicks and it was done. One of the benefits of having a legal copy, I presume.

Anyway, just thought it’d be worth noting for Mac users that you too can have an SDR instrument on your desktop. You do have to run it inside a Windows VM, but that doesn’t seem to be much of an inconvenience.

On the left, you see WinRadio; it has a lot fewer features than SpectraVue, but on the other hand, it acts a good deal more like a radio than a spectrum analysis tool. It doesn’t seem to have any system for managing memories, but that may just be new-user unfamiliarity. I confess to not (yet) having RTFM. I will update this post if I learn otherwise.

Some benefits WinRadio brings to the desktop are ECSS reception for standard SW and AM signals, and DRM (Digital Radio Mondial), a digital reception mode. ECSS works very well indeed; DRM is… well, it’s interesting. Haven’t got that figured out yet. I downloaded the DReaM decoder, and tuned in to some DRM broadcasts, but haven’t got anything to report other than no success.Read the rest of this entry »

I often read the predictions of futurists with interest; it is always enjoyable for me to consider what they have to say, why I might agree or disagree, and mentally file them away for later validation – or not.

Today, I’m going to venture a few predictions of my own, based on the state of affairs that exists in early March, 2009. The idea is to re-visit them in the years to come and see how many, if any, were close to how things actually develop.